I'm not from the united states. I'm saying this from the perspective of an outsider, and most of the people here think the same. Americans have serious loyalty issues, coming from self hatred. I'm watching from the outside, seeing things like snowden, and judging by how I would've reacted to a similar story in our country compared to how the U.S people reacted. A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad. This is not the way to change things.
The news coverage of the Snowden leaks being taken at face value probably played a part in this. Non-technical journalists made assumptions which were either unsubstantiated or even sometimes refuted by the leaked material accompanying the coverage.
Examples which I still hear repeated: The claim that NSA considers TOR users to be extremists (Based purely off XKS DSL code which was used to filter connections), claims that there is a loophole allowing NSA to collect American information via GCHQ (In reality US Person Information protections apply regardless of who collected the data), and claims that companies are willing "partners" of the NSA via PRISM (Whereas PRISM is actually the term used to describe use of the FBI and a FISA warrant+gag to collect non-US Person data from US companies using an assumed-to-be automated process, the companies themselves not actually having a choice in the matter).
NSA seems to have decided to not push back on the untrue claims or assumptions which were conveyed. There were responses along the lines of "the organization does everything within the bounds of US law for national security purposes" which is quite meaningless and only served to make people more upset. With the material already out there, NSA PR probably could have done much better if they responded in an informed and blunt manner, instead of allowing the "blanks" to be filled in by assumptions.
I understand and fully agree with your main point, but it isn't too hard to see why this attitude is prevalent regarding the US IC these days, as most folks have not read the source material and are relying on what the press coverage either stated or implied.
There are certainly a number of Americans who feel the same way. Most of us, though, like to believe we value liberty above loyalty. Both are valuable, but where the two conflict, the former takes precedence (even if we sometimes end up in a messy debate over the interpretation of "liberty").
If that attitude has yielded "one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there", as you called it elsewhere, I don't see that as a bad thing.
> A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad.
That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse.
(The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)
It shouldn't be surprising that we're not blindly loyal to our government; our country was founded when our ancestors kicked out a tyrannical government.
For many of us, our loyalty is to our country as a whole, and the ideals upon which it was founded, not to any regime that attempts to abuse those ideals without our knowledge.
